Filling in the Land Acquisition Education Gaps with Land Academy (LA 1564)
Filling in the Land Acquisition Education Gaps with Land Academy (LA 1564)
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Good day.
Steven Butala:
Welcome to the LandAcademy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about filling in the land acquisition education gaps with LandAcademy. This is all about understanding that you can buy and sell land. A lot of it’s unwanted land for a pretty substantial profit with not a tremendous of cash outlay.
Steven Butala:
But what are the tiny little nuances, or the things that tell us exactly how to do it? What’s the trick? What are the key things that I missed in all this other education that I see out there? Great. I know you can make money. What’s the real deal?
Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny? I didn’t know this until it happened that so many people over the years, since LandAcademy, have said, “Oh, my gosh, you guys. I didn’t know this. You filled in this piece. This was all of the questions that I had, that the little things, you covered them all.” I think a lot of them… What’s interesting, too? A lot of those people have said, “I did it with the podcast.” They have said that they’ve learned a lot and filled in a lot of missing information free right here on the podcast.
Steven Butala:
And here’s a great real-world example. There are other people that are pretty loud out on the internet about… First of all, all the people that are in this teaching land space, every single one, without exception, except Jack Bosch, were LandAcademy members at one point. So, they’ve taken our concept and made it into some funky little niche. In a lot of cases, they copied exactly what we’re doing and put their own face on it.
Steven Butala:
But there’s several things that I think everybody’s missing, and they are tiny little nuances. For example, the vast majority of people still don’t send out offers. They send out letters of interest.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
Or they just send letters to people who are in a back tech situation.
Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Or I think they’re not effectively pricing as well as they could.
Steven Butala:
Or they don’t have the integrity that you should have as a acquisition or an investor and the compassion when you’re talking to a seller and finding out why they’re doing this, and what’s going on.
Jill DeWit:
This is good stuff to talk about.
Steven Butala:
Before we get into it, though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit:
Chris wrote, “I’m new to the land business and looking for others to join an accountability group. Whether you just joined LandAcademy as I did a few days ago, or are otherwise somewhat new to the business, it’s all good. I anticipate we’ll be running into a lot of the same questions and hurdles around the same time as we do our research, get out our first mailers. Mine will go out next week, field our first phone calls, et cetera. More answers and knowledge than we could ever ask for are here in the forums, education, podcasts, weekly calls, et cetera.” Right, it’s a lot.
Jill DeWit:
“So, we are covered there, but what we can provide each other some accountability and encouragement as we rack up our first success stories. Not to mention learning from whatever unique talents/experience we each bring to the table, and that landed us in this business. I, myself,” it says, “experienced software developer/business owner. Perhaps a biweekly networking call over Zoom, and a free Slack channel to stay in touch in the meantime? Anyone interested, please reply to this thread or send me a private message. Thanks.”
Steven Butala:
This is all you.
Jill DeWit:
This is something that we are actually working on. I’m so happy.
Steven Butala:
Me, too.
Jill DeWit:
This started just in the last… I don’t even think in the last year. I think it’s less than a year, that people have come together, as we’ve always come together with investing and different things and they’ve come together and I realized, this is something that we could do and make each other accountable, and on track, and get our businesses rolling, and help each other. So, we have watched you, and we have been lucky to be guests in a few of your accountability groups. So, we hear you. That’s one of the things, this is LandAcademy, by the way. You ask, we listen.
Steven Butala:
That’s right.
Jill DeWit:
We’re paying attention. We hear you. So we are doing it right now. It’s going to definitely be by the end of the year. I don’t know exactly what month, probably November when we start this, is what I’m guessing, but we’re putting together a LandAcademy way of helping you and getting some accountability groups up and going. We’re going to make some groups and Steven and I are going to be directly involved in them, as with people on our staff, other top members. Again, we’re kind of brainstorming here, but it’s coming.
Steven Butala:
This posting, specifically, in LandInvestors, I’m extremely confident of the thousands and thousands and thousands of postings, is these had the single most responses.
Jill DeWit:
Wow.
Steven Butala:
So, I know this is our next product, we are working on it on a daily basis to launch this so that you have a place to go when you’re at very step one, like,” I’m brand new and I’m not sure exactly what to do first. Yeah, I’ve looked through all the education that you provide and I’m run through it all. And I need a group where I can meet on Tuesday or something like that and say, you know what, I’m ready to do this. And I think these five counties work. Can you please let me know if you think they work?” Really hands-on stuff. So it’s continuing education/accountability. We don’t know what we’re going to call it yet, but that’s the reason I put this in here. We think it’s important too.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. What’s interesting is that this is what our weekly member call was intended to be in the beginning as a way for you to have direct access with us, ask us any questions and just have immediate answers. But the group has grown, I think, and now we’re going, it’s every Thursday, at 3 o’clock Pacific and it’s now, whew, over a two hour call. We will easily hit two hours every week answering the questions. And I know that people need a little more individual attention and we hear you and we’re going to make it happen.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic filling in the land acquisition education gaps with LandAcademy. This is the meat of the show.
Steven Butala:
So everybody gets the framework. Unless you just crawled out of a rock and you realize that buying and selling land can be profitable, you already know that sending out a mail campaign, pricing offers correctly, sending it out to the most likely people that you think are going to respond to your letter and then managing the inflow of calls and on and on. And that skeletal type framework, you already know about that. It’s the little things that you need to fill in the gaps, which really are getting serious about… If you’re getting serious about this, you’re just better in a group. You’re better in a group than you are on your own. Jill says a million times, “I wish we had LandAcademy 10 years ago.”
Jill DeWit:
I do. One of the things that I see a lot right now that comes up, one of the gaps that I know we really help with in several different ways is due diligence. One of the, that’s a big thing. You get the offers out. The letters come back, the calls come back, now I’m staring at, looking at the property. Do I want to buy it? Is the price right? Is it a good property? Am I really seeing what I think I should see? Is there something else I should be watching for? Is there an HOA? What are the tax situations? There’s… And little things like access. What’s good access? What’s not good access? Things like that. So one of the things that we have been able to help people with is not only answering those questions, like showing them, but providing the tools for them to do them themselves, like neighbor scoop.
Jill DeWit:
That’s a big one. That’s a big one for me. I still, every day that I’m reviewing property, I can’t believe right now that I could sit down and review 20 properties in under a half hour.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
It’s a dream now. 20 properties would have taken me a full day, probably two, because first thing I would have had to do is struggle finding them. So for those of you have not tried us, when you… Most of the properties that we’re buying don’t have a street address. There’s no mail delivered there. They don’t have that yet. So you can’t pop it into Google Earth and find it. So you have to… And the legal description, good luck. That doesn’t help you, too. So even if you know the subdivision, I got to find this in the visual, which is the block and the lot? Okay, I got to figure that out. I got to get a plat map. What’s a plat map? Where do I get a plat map? These are all the things that we used to have to do. And now I can just go state, county, APN, boom. I’m staring at it. It’s wonderful.
Steven Butala:
There’s a lot of tiny little gaps. I don’t know. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is every Thursday, we have a two hour… Now it ends up being a two hour webinar rating people’s deals. So all our members have these deals coming in. The great ones, I’m sure they do. The terrible ones, I think they throw away. But the vast majority, even for us, the deals that come in, it’s like, “Ah, I love it at 5,000. And I hate it 10,000 and your price of 17,000? No way.” And so that kind of immediate feedback, I hope people are on the phone at the sellers, either renegotiating the deal or killing it in real time during these support. It’s the support that we… Look, we teach this stuff because we failed at it. Jill and I spent 20 years failing… Me, before Jill, spent 20 years honing in on how to do this buy and sell land. And we got all the gaps filled.
Jill DeWit:
So one of the important things is we try to stay ahead of the game. We try really hard to be out in front, figuring things out, to share with you.
Steven Butala:
This is not a commercial, by the way.
Jill DeWit:
No, and this is one of the beauties of this. I know this from our community that we can save you. It’s not like you’re going to… Can you imagine, “Okay, here’s the real estate handbook and it’s never going to change.” Do you think that laws never change and the way you have to do things never change? Think about just since COVID. Every agent now had to add how many forms to their arsenal. And all they say is, “You got to stay ahead of the game and to do that, you’ve got to stay involved and engaged.” And that’s what we want to help you with. That’s what we’re trying to do.
Jill DeWit:
I know I don’t want this to be a commercial, too. I’m trying to-
Steven Butala:
Tiffany in our Monday interview said, “You guys filled in the gaps.” She went to other places. She learned a bunch of stuff. When is less education better? Never. More education is always better. Go all over the internet and learn all you can. And hopefully LandAcademy makes sense to you in part somehow, even if it’s just the free stuff, I really mean that. But this person on a Monday in the interview, Tiffany said, “You filled in… I learned a lot of stuff and you guys completed it.” So that’s what the whole point of this show is. And she’s not the only person who said this to us. It happens weekly actually.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true. Even just the podcast, I’ve had people say, “I learned how to do this with the podcast.” They’ve told me, “Jill, I learned how to do this with a podcast. And then I perfected it when I gotten really involved.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s really cool.”
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
That makes me happy. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the LandAcademy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the LandAcademy Show is called Why Smart People Understand The Land Investment Business Model? You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Steven Butala:
This is another offshoot, a comment that Tiffany made an in the Monday interview. And she said, There’s a lot of moving parts to this.” To which I say, anytime, there’s a lot of moving parts to anything. You take a look at it like an almost in a manufacturing way. And you say, you got to break it all down into little manufacturing steps. Little steps of the arm, little tiny welds. And there are people who revel in that and understand it and can deconstruct it and make a lot of sense out of it. I’m one of those people that Tiffany obvious also is, but she said “There’s a lot of people don’t get it.”
Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny about that. When you said break it down a little parts. I was watching a TED Talk the other day. It was really, it was interesting because he talked about, “Imagine I could teach you to paint this beautiful painting in less than five minutes or like seconds.” And what he said was, “If you could drew one little, do with one little box and break the painting down into a little grid, then you could do it.” Which was true. And he showed this famous artist and doing a huge mural on a like a 10 foot tall canvas and how he really does it is, he breaks it down with grids and does a beautiful, portrait of a face. It was like a picture of Brad Pitt kind of thing seriously.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m like, and so his point of the whole TED Talk was, “Why don’t you do that with life? Why don’t you do that with everything?” No one looks at building a house… Remember back in the day where you would hear people, “My grandpa built this house.” Grandpa didn’t stand there and just go, “I got it, ready, go.” I got mail. You know what I mean? I’m sure that didn’t happen. Grandpa had to think about that foundation. You have to have some plans. There’s steps and processes, and you have to put it into task. You don’t like my example of it.
Steven Butala:
I love it. I love that example. No, I love it, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
I thought you were trying to hurry me up.
Steven Butala:
No, no. I think deconstructing, when you can break something down into steps, it’s manageable.
Jill DeWit:
Right. I believe that.
Steven Butala:
I also believe that it’s very, very, very, very hard for the vast majority of people to understand this concept. And then it’s even harder for the people who do understand it, to execute on it. And our Monday interview, she figured it all out.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, you’re right.
Steven Butala:
I mean, it’s very natural for you. Once in a while, Jill and I will be in an interview or we’ll have an interview or we’ll get done doing a live event or whatever. And we’ll look at each other and say, “I never had to explain that to you at all.” And I just have never had to explain anything to Jill. I mean, ever.
Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny about that. What is it that makes someone different that they don’t get overwhelmed? I think most people get overwhelmed, but I don’t know why I’m not afraid of it. I’m not, I will really sit and think about it. Maybe it just comes naturally, I guess. I’ll sit and think about it, even though it sounds crazy. Like you bring to me these ideas, you bring big ideas to me sometime, and I never really get overwhelmed. I’m like, all right, so I start putting the wheels in place. I need a person to handle that. I need a person to handle that. I need to take care of that. I start the process right away. So maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please get on over to our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button.
Steven Butala:
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Steve and Jill:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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